In the apartment tower’s basement, her killer entered the power utility room. He removed the cover from one of the building management array cabinets, and took a handheld array from his pocket. The unit spooled out a length of fiber-optic cable with a standard v-jack on the end, which he plugged into the cabinet’s exposed maintenance socket. Several new programs were downloaded, and quickly piggybacked their way onto the existing software. When it was done, he pulled the v-jack out and replaced the cover with the correct locking tool.
Tara Jennifer Shaheef’s bathroom was decorated in marble, while the ceiling was a single giant mirror. Recessed lighting around the rim of the bath cast a warm rose-pink glow across the room, flickering in an imitation of candlelight. The bath itself was a sunken affair big enough for two, which she’d filled to the brim and added a variety of salts to. When she got in, the spar nozzles came on, churning the water against her skin. She sank into the sculpted seat, and rested her head back on the cushion. Her e-butler called up some music from the household array. Tara listened to the melody in a pleasant semidoze.
Morton was away for a week at Talansee on the other side of the planet, attending a conference with a housing developer group he was trying to negotiate a deal with. AquaState, the company he and Tara had set up together, manufactured semiorganic moisture extractor leaves that provided water for remote buildings, and was finally starting to take off. Morton was eager to capitalize on their growing success, moving the company toward a public flotation that would bring in a huge amount of money for further expansion. But his devotion to his work meant that for seven whole days she didn’t have to produce any excuses about where she’d been or what she’d been doing. She could spend the whole time with Wyobie Cotal, the rather delectable young man she’d snagged for herself. It was mainly for what he did to her in bed, but they also traveled around the city and enjoyed its places and events as well. That’s what made this affair so special. Wyobie paid attention to all those areas that Morton either ignored or had simply forgotten in his eternal obsession to advance their company. These seven days were going to be a truly wonderful break, she was determined about that. Then maybe afterward… After all, they’d been married for thirteen years. What more did Morton want? Marriages always went stale in the end. You just shook hands and moved on.
Her killer walked across the ground-floor lobby, and his e-butler requested an elevator to take him up to the twenty-fifth floor. He stood underneath the discreet security sensor above the doors as he waited. He didn’t care, after all, it wasn’t his face he was wearing.
Tara was still deliberating about what to wear that evening when the hauntingly powerful orchestral chorus vanished abruptly. The bathroom lights died. The spar jets shut down. Tara opened her eyes resentfully. A power failure was so boring. She thought the apartment was supposed to be immune from such things. It had certainly never happened before.
After a few seconds, the lights still hadn’t come back on. She told her e-butler to ask the household array what was happening. It told her it couldn’t get a reply, nothing seemed to be working. Now she frowned in annoyance. This simply couldn’t happen, that’s what backups and duplicated systems were for.
She waited for a little while longer. The bath was such a tranquil place, and she wanted her skin to be just perfect for her lover that night. But no matter how hard she wished and cursed, the power stayed off. Eventually, she struggled to her feet and stepped out. That was when she realized just how dark the apartment was. She really couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. Using irritation to cover any bud of genuine concern, she decided not to feel around for a towel. Instead she cautiously made her way out into the corridor. There was a glimmer of light available there, at least. It came from the broad archway leading into the lounge.
Tara hurried through into the big room, only mildly concerned what her soaking wet feet would do to the wooden floor. Light from the illuminated city washed in through the balcony windows. It gave the room a dark monochrome perspective. Her lips hardened in annoyance as she looked out at the twinkling lights. This was the only apartment that seemed to be suffering.
Something moved in the hallway. Large. Silent. She turned. “What—”
The killer fired a nervejam pulse from his customized pistol. Every muscle in Tara’s body locked solid for a second. The pulse overloaded most of the neural connections in her brain, making death instantaneous. She never felt a thing. Her muscles unlocked, and the corpse crumpled to the floor.
He walked over to her, and spent a moment looking down. Then he pulled out an em pulser and placed it on the back of her head, where the memory-cell insert was. The gadget discharged. He triggered it another three times, making absolutely sure the insert would be scrambled beyond recovery. No matter how good a clone body the re-life procedure produced for her, the most recent section of Tara Jennifer Shaheef’s life was now lost for ever.
The killer’s e-butler sent an instruction to the apartment’s array, which turned the lights back on. He sat in the big sofa, facing the door, and waited.
Wyobie Cotal arrived forty-six minutes later. There was a somewhat smug and anticipatory smile on the young first-lifer’s face as he walked into the room. It turned to an expression of total shock as he saw the naked corpse on the floor. He’d barely registered the man sitting on the sofa opposite before the nervejam pistol fired again.
The killer repeated the procedure with the em pulser, erasing the carefully stored duplicate memories of the last few months of Wyobie Cotal’s life from his memorycell insert. After that, he moved into the spare bedroom, pulling three large suitcases and a big trunk out from their storage closet. By the time he’d got them into the master bedroom, three robot trolleys had arrived from the tower’s delivery bay, carrying several plastic packing crates.
His first job was shoving the bodies into the two largest crates and sealing them tight. He then spent the next two and a half hours collecting every item of Tara’s in the apartment, gradually filling the remaining crates with them. Her clothes went into the cases and trunk.
When he was finished, the trolleys loaded up the crates again, and took them back down the service elevator to the delivery bay, where two hired trucks were waiting. The crates containing the bodies went into one truck, while everything else went into the second.
Upstairs the killer drained the bath, then ordered the maidbots to give the apartment a class-one cleaning. He left the little machines busy at work scouring the floors and walls for dust and dirt, conscientiously switching off the lights as he went.
FOUR
So here she was, in the bleak small hours of the morning, strapped tightly into the confined cockpit of a hyperglider that was tethered to the barren rock floor of Stakeout Canyon waiting for the storm to arrive with its two hundred kilometers per hour winds. At her age, and with her family heritage behind her, there were probably a great many better things for Justine Burnelli to be doing. Most of the ones she could think of right now involved beds with silk sheets (preferably shared with a man), or spa baths, or extremely expensive restaurants, or plush nightclubs. But the only luxuries within about a thousand kilometers were currently racing away from her as fast as the support crews could drive the convoy’s mobile homes over this god-awful terrain. And it was all thanks to her newest best friend: Estella Fenton.
They’d met in the day lounge of the exclusive Washington rejuvenation clinic she always used, both of them just out of the tank and undergoing physiotherapy, hydrotherapy, massage, and herbal aromatherapy, among other remedies to bring some life back to limbs and muscles that hadn’t been used for fourteen months. They moved like old-time geriatrics, an irony made worse by their apparently adolescent bodies.